The Eighth Sunday After Trinity (July 30, 2023) - Fr. Wesley Walker

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. In Amen.

A saying I have heard repeated by different parishioners at multiple times pretty much since I arrived at St. Paul’s is that when we tell God our plans, he’ll laugh. Think about where you were five to ten years ago. Have things gone according to your plans? There’s a great human lie that we all tell ourselves in one way or another that we are in control. Everything will go the way we plan it because we’re in charge.

This is a drama that plays out in Abraham’s story. In fact, I would argue that this way of thinking is one of Abraham’s major vices that he has to unlearn. There are at least three incidences in Abraham’s life that come to mind when we’re talking about his flaws. In Genesis 12, Abraham lies to Pharaoh in Egypt, saying that Sarah is his sister, not his wife. He does this because he’s afraid that Pharaoh, seeing Sarah’s beauty, will be jealous of Abraham and possibly have him killed. Of course, this lie comes with unattended consequences: Pharaoh ends up taking Sarah into his house, forcing her into an uncomfortable love triangle founded on deceit. Funny enough, you’d think Abraham would learn his lesson and not try this again but he does almost the identical thing with Sarah in Genesis 20 while they’re in the land of Gerar with the king Abimelech who takes Sarah into his house as well. In between these two stories is the story of Hagar and Ishmael, a story that’s near and dear to my heart. So much so I wrote a thesis about it (but don’t worry, I won’t read it to you today). In that story, Sarah takes Hagar, her Egyptian servant, and gives her to Abraham—note the verbal similarity to the Adam and Eve story where Eve takes the fruit and gives it to Adam. The purpose of this exploitation is for Abraham to realize God’s promise of descendants even though the means of Hagar are outside the way God intended to bring that promise to fruition. In each case, we have misplaced initiative, attempts at prudence that end up creating more problems than they solve. Of course, in each case, God intervenes; he miraculously makes the two kings aware that Sarah is actually married and he provides spectacularly for Hagar and Ishmael. But these incidents in Abraham’s history are reminders that it’s always better for us to trust and obey. If we want to flourish, we will listen to how God, our Creator who knows us even better than we know ourselves, tells us what flourishing looks like.

Part of this flourishing is recognizing that while we are in control of ourselves and how we respond to situations, we are not usually in control of those circumstances, God is. And I believe that by the time we get to Abraham in our Old Testament reading this morning from Genesis 24, he has finally begun to learn the important lesson about who is actually in control. Abraham is nearing his old age and he recognizes God’s past faithfulness in giving him Isaac and preserving Isaac during the ordeal with the sacrifice that we read last week. Rather than taking matters into his own hands, Abraham embraces a posture of trust that might remind us of how he responded when God called him to leave his homeland and family. And so Abraham calls his most trusted servant to send him out to find Isaac a wife from Abraham’s own family. After dwelling in the land of Canaan, he has seen that intermarriage with the people there wouldn’t be good for the continuation of the line. This isn’t Abraham being ethnocentric or racist; we should be aware that the people in Canaan were engaged in crimes against humanity that included things like child sacrifice. In fact, we should read the story about the sacrifice of Isaac as an explicit rebuttal against the way the Canaanites treated children—God doesn’t want human sacrifice; he sacrifices himself for humans. And so seeing the mess, Abraham sends his servant back to his homeland in search of a wife for Isaac. Rather than trying to exert himself, Abraham allows the servant an out: if he finds a woman who won’t return with him, then the servant is released from the oath. And so when the servant arrives and goes to the well for water, he makes a kind of bargain with God: “let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also: let the same be she that thou hast appointed for thy servant Isaac” (Gen 24:14). And, before he’s even done praying, a woman comes to the well, and, when he asks her for water, she offers some for his camels as well. God is faithful, God delivers. God providentially ordered Abraham and the servant’s steps to give them exactly what they needed.

Now I’m going to get personal for a minute. Maybe I’m preaching to myself at this point. This week didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would. I don’t want to overstate things Caroline went to her aunt’s funeral last Sunday but on her way to the park and ride, her Jeep started acting funny. So Monday, I got her car towed to a mechanic. After working on it all day Tuesday and Wednesday, I got a call Wednesday evening from the mechanic saying that it was catastrophic engine failure. This is of course on top of the reality, still fresh, that we lost Len Bender. I’m sure your week hasn’t gone as planned either. When we’re faced with tough situations, there are three possible responses. We could fall into the sin of despair and doubt that God can really do anything with our situation. Might as well pack it up and go home because things are so bad not even God can help. What a nihilistic and, ultimately, hopeless way of thinking about the world. Another response, and it’s fitting we read the Gospel from St. Matthew where Jesus condemns the false teachers, is that we can buy into something like the prosperity Gospel that tells us hey, if you have enough faith, you’ll experience prosperity. Believe hard enough and maybe a Rolls Royce will show up in your driveway. Of course, this is not at all what the Scriptures tell us the Christian life is like; there’s struggle, there’s wrestling, there’s moments where you’re simply not sure what God’s doing but you kind of wish he’d hurry up and resolve that situation. And so if we want to avoid nihilism and we want to avoid myths like the Prosperity Gospel, where do we turn? What can we do? The answer relies in trust.

Trust involves hope based on God’s past faithfulness to us and the present reality of our sonship. Abraham could look back at his life and see all the places where God had been faithful to him which then provided an incentive for him to trust in God and send the servant back to his homeland; similarly, we can look at all the places in our lives where God has been faithful to us and use those moments as Ebenezers, monuments to him that allow us to put our trust in him. Further, it helps us to remember that all of us who have passed through the waters of baptism are sons and daughters of God. In Luke 11:11-13, Jesus asks, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” You are a child of God, the same God whose property is always to have mercy, who is always faithful. Our hope is not, cannot be in vain.

It’s also important for us to remember that trust involves uniting our experiences to Christ and his suffering. When we suffer, when we have moments of doubt, or seasons of hardship, we can look to him who bears our burdens when we could not possibly bear them ourselves. Jesus lived a perfect life, to the point that he died for us and then defeated death by the resurrection. He’s earned our trust.

Finally, we must remember that trust means living in the Spirit, knowing that God is enough and he gives us enough. Consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field who God continually provides for, and are we not more precious than them? As baptized Christians, we can be confident that the Spirit, our helper and paraclete, is always at work in us, moving us to put away those things that are harmful and giving us those things that are profitable.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.